Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [23]
The journalist replied first. Dear Chandran, Of course I remember your father. My favourite babu… “Babu,” an anglicised Indian, was a mistake; the word should have been “sadhu,” an ascetic. But Willie didn't mind. The letter seemed friendly. It asked Willie to come to the newspaper office, and early one afternoon a week or so later Willie made his way to Fleet Street. It was warm and bright, but Willie had been made to believe that it rained all the time in England, and he wore a raincoat. The raincoat was very thin, of a rubbery material that sweated on the very smooth inside almost as soon as it was worn; so that by the time Willie had got to the big black newspaper building the top and sides of his jacket and the back of his collar were damp, and when he took off the sweated, clinging raincoat he looked as though he had walked through a drizzle.
He gave his name to a man in uniform, and after a while the journalist, in a dark suit and not young, came down and he and Willie talked standing up in the lobby. They didn't get on. They didn't have anything to talk about. The journalist asked about the babu; Willie didn't correct him; and when they had finished that subject they both looked about them. The journalist began to talk about the newspaper in a defensive way, and Willie understood that the newspaper didn't like Indian independence and was not friendly to India and that the journalist himself had written some hard pieces after his visit to the country.
The journalist said, “It's Beaverbrook, really. He has no time for Indians. He's like Churchill in some respects.”
Willie said, “Who is Beaverbrook?”
The journalist dropped his voice. “He's our proprietor.” It amused him that Willie didn't know something so stupendous.
Willie noticed, and thought, “I am glad I didn't know. I am glad I wasn't impressed.”
Somebody had come through the main door, which was at Willie's back. The journalist looked to one side of Willie, to follow the progress of the new arrival.
He said, with awe, “That's our editor.”
Willie saw a dark-suited middle-aged man, pink-faced after lunch, going up the steps at the far side of the lobby.
The journalist, gazing at his editor, said, “His name is Arthur Christiansen. They say he is the greatest editor in the world.” Then, as though speaking to himself, he said, “It takes a lot to get there.” Willie looked with the journalist at the great man going up the steps. Then, setting aside that mood, the journalist said in a jokey way, “I hope you haven't come to ask for his job.”
Willie didn't laugh. He said, “I'm a student. I am here on a scholarship. I am not looking for a job.”
“Where are you?”
Willie gave the name of his college.
The journalist didn't know it. Willie thought, “He's trying to insult me. My college is quite big and quite real.”
The journalist said in his new jokey way, “Are you asthmatic? I ask only because our proprietor is asthmatic and he has a special feeling for asthmatics. If you wanted a job it would be something in your favour.”
That was where the meeting ended, and Willie was ashamed for his father, who must have been mocked by the journalist in what he wrote, and ashamed at himself for having gone back on his decision to stay away from his father's friends.
A few days later there came a letter from the great writer after whom Willie was named. It was on a small sheet of Clar-idge's paper—the very hotel from where Krishna Menon had set out on his short walk to the park that afternoon, no doubt to think about his United Nations